Following a story[1] on Slashdot, I upgraded to X.Org, which is looking
like it will be the successor to XFree86 due to all the licensing
hoo-ha. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, ignore this part.)
Surprisingly enough, Gentoo already had an ebuild in there when I
checked. So after using quickpkg(1) to make a copy of
x11-base/xfree-4.3.99.902, I unmerged XFree86 and attempted to merge
X.Org (x11-base/xorg-x11).

Well, I guess it was coincidence, but emerge(1) decided to break just
then. And other people, it seems, have had it break in a similar
fashion[2][3]. My solution was found in the last post of the first link
I gave. After merging, I logged out and back in to get /usr/X11R6/bin
back in my $PATH (since I didn't feel like updating it manually). Then
there were lots of complaints about libGL-type stuff when I tried to run
mplayer or glxinfo. Turns out that I simply needed to run "opengl-update
xorg-x11" due to the way Gentoo handles OpenGL stuff.

Besides fonts looking a little different, about the only negative
difference I've noticed is that Yahoo! Messenger is now segfaulting.
Other than that, everything seems to be fine; Quake 3 Arena, Unreal
Tournament, and UT2004 are all working properly.

In case anyone can help out with the ymessenger, issue, here's what
happens:

$ ymessenger

Gdk-WARNING **: Missing charsets in FontSet creation


Gdk-WARNING **: ISO8859-1


Gdk-WARNING **: Missing charsets in FontSet creation


Gdk-WARNING **: ISO8859-1


Gdk-WARNING **: Missing charsets in FontSet creation


Gdk-WARNING **: ISO8859-1


Gdk-WARNING **: Missing charsets in FontSet creation


Gdk-WARNING **: ISO8859-1


Gdk-WARNING **: Missing charsets in FontSet creation


Gdk-WARNING **: ISO8859-1


Gdk-WARNING **: Missing charsets in FontSet creation


Gdk-WARNING **: ISO8859-1


Gdk-CRITICAL **: file gdkfont.c: line 220 (gdk_font_ref): assertion `font != NULL' failed.

Gdk-CRITICAL **: file gdkfont.c: line 220 (gdk_font_ref): assertion `font != NULL' failed.
Segmentation fault

It obviously has something to do with the fonts, but my X11 font-fu is
non-existant.

[1] http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/07/1320251
[2] http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=128037
[3] http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=158444

-- 
Bill Jonas    *    bill@billjonas.com    *    http://www.billjonas.com/
"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your front door.  You step
into the Road,  and if you don't keep your feet,  there  is  no knowing
where you might be swept off to."  --  Bilbo Baggins